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my feature ‘Sadoum‘ won Best Film of December edition at the European Cinematography Awards and now in official selection for the yearly festival (with only 10 other films) and nominated for the Golden Eagle 2017! Results after the screening in Warsaw – Poland!

SADOUM nominated as Best Direction and Best Actor and a WINNER for FOUR AWARDS at the Monkey Bread Tree Film Awards in London – Spring 2017: http://themonkeybreadtree.com/spring-2017/

Best Feature Film(made for less than 5000 $): « With a particular experimental style, ‘Sadoum’ navigates through varying different locales, scenarios and arcs of human life. There’s much to appreciate about this film – its editing is often full of creative bursts, the framing calculated and artistic, and most of all, for its rather modest budget, the film appears as a first class art house product. Sure, the digital photography at times ages the project a little, and it occasionally feels perhaps out of sync with our current dialogue of cinema – but, at its core, the film is incredibly unique, original and unpredictable. »

JURY PRIZE : » The world which the tormented main character of ‘Sadoum’ inhabits is what pulls the viewer into a poetic trip of his search of identity.As part of a city full of violence, aggressiveness, and feelings of loneliness, he searches for who he is. His boyfriend is a lost ship. So he starts to play a cat and mouse game of attracting and rejecting a woman, in the hopes to find his true self? The aesthetics of the film are well chosen. The colors often underline the various aspects of this persona’s journey. The actors play sometimes quite grotesque beings, which suits the overall story, and gives a great emotional layer to the lead’s neurosis. Some images within this film remind me of ‘The Balled of Sexual Dependency’ by the photographer Nan Goldin. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with natural light. She has affectionately documented people looking in mirrors, in bathrooms and barrooms, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. »

Best Editing: « As with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work, Karabache’s editing of Sadoum generates a particular pace and feeling – one which often helps to determine the shape of the film’s arcs, a scene’s atmosphere, and our experience of the film. It is through this main element of editing that allows the film to be elevated into a well rounded cognitive experience. »

Best Actress (Marie-Cécile Gueguen): « With independent film, there is often a feeling of compromise. With Maire-Cécile Gueguen’s performance however, there isn’t a whiff of such a notion. Her performance in Sadoum is pure, energetic, uncompromising and open. »